


No Children

by No_Shadow_In_Sun



Category: The Mountain Goats (Band)
Genre: Gen, Original Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 01:23:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13823508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/No_Shadow_In_Sun/pseuds/No_Shadow_In_Sun
Summary: 4H follows a schedule: in the morning she gets ready for work, in the afternoon she eats at the cafe across the street, and at night she prepares for the screaming match from 5H.





	No Children

**Author's Note:**

> This is a short-story I wrote for a creative writing class that I based off of "No Children" by the Mountain Goats.

The woman in apartment 4H woke up every morning to make herself coffee, put on makeup, and catch the bus to the dentist office where she worked as a hygienist. Every day she got lunch at the cafe across the street from work and ordered one of the light and fluffy chocolate pastries while she watched the people walk by the window to head back to work after their lunch break. Every night she was made to listen to all of the smashings and shouting the reverberated from apartment 5H directly above her.

She calls them Twinkie and the Pain because she assumes that they wake up each morning and think, ‘What should we do today? What we do every day; annoy our neighbors to no end.’ They’re a couple in their mid-fifties who quite obviously hate each other. She has to wonder if the marriage involved blackmail, bribery, or some sort of complicated hypnotism that went horribly wrong. They fight about nearly everything; once she heard them arguing about which of them loved Lucky Charms more, and it ended with the box being thrown out the window.

No one in their complex has ever spoken to them. 3C says that the people that used to live in apartment 4H were their friends, but they stopped going over for dinner. Apparently, they gave up on trying to help them because they were a lost cause. Many people have tried calling the cops, and many people have heard the rare times the miserable couple agrees on something when they’re shouting at the cops to mind their own business. 4H has taken to writing down what they fight about, thinking that maybe she can write a book or rant about it to the people whose teeth she’s cleaning; they have tools in their mouth, it’s not like they can complain.

Above her a glass smashes against a wall, so she sits down to listen and wonders if it would be too morbid to pop some popcorn right now.

“It’s been thirty-two years, Tony!” The Pain yells. She seems to be the one with a liking for dramatics. She’s all about smashing glasses or starting to shout mid-word to get everything more heated.

“Thirty-two years of what? A prison sentence?” Twinkie calls back. He’s balding and red-skinned and sweaty, and his stomach falls over his belt at this point. 4H doesn’t think that he was ever a handsome man, just as the Pain is a very fair woman with wispy, mouse brown hair, small brown eyes, and a hooked nose that sits above thin lips constantly set in a frown.

Their argument isn’t creative tonight, she’s sad to note. Just more calling about how much she wishes he’d put his socks in the hamper and he wishes that she’d put the cap on the toothpaste. This fight would be normal if it weren’t for the volume and the fact that there is no makeup or even makeup sex. If it’s always darkest before the sun rises then perhaps the sun burned out long before the marriage ever took place. But maybe tomorrow is the dawn.

\-------------------------------------

She doesn’t recognize her when she sits down on the bus, and that has much to do with the small smile on her face.

“Good morning, neighbor.” She says cautiously, mostly to be polite.

“Oh, hello, you live in 4H, right? I’m Rebecca.” The Pain -- Rebecca -- says with an attractive smile. “How are you doing?”

She blinks, wondering if she’s woken up in a universe parallel to her own, but she rushes out to say, “I’m well, and you?” before the pause gets to be too long.

Rebecca says that she’s doing well, too, that she’s going into town for more toothpaste, which earns a subtle eye twitch from 4H, and that she thought she would get some groceries while she was out. The conversation continues until the stop for the store approaches, and then she in on her way.

4H sits quietly for a bit, trying to process what just happened. It wasn't a long or deep conversation; after all, it's a small town, so there aren't that many bus stops. But it makes her think that perhaps Twinkie is the problem in that relationship? Or maybe the Pain is a remarkable actress? Nothing that just happened makes sense. She’s heard every argument between these two for a year; they don’t want anything nice to happen. This couple wants the other to stub their toes on the table legs or to cut themselves shaving. They never have a happy moment or memory to share. There is no playfulness, no joking; it’s all dripping in malice.

Later that night it starts over again.

“Put your damn drink down when I’m talking to you, Tony!”

“But if I get sober now, then I won’t be drunk in the morning, I’ll be hungover, and then your screaming might finally kill me!”

“I’ve been trying for years, and it hasn’t worked yet! If you keep drinking that you’ll never be able to remember all of the wonderful memories that we don’t have!”

“Maybe I’ll drown in it then, but you best believe that I’m dragging you under with me!”

“GOOD! I HOPE WE BOTH DIE! I HOPE I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN! I HOPE THAT I NEVER SEE ANY OF THIS AGAIN!”

And the door slams. 4H sits up suddenly. That’s never happened before. No one ever leaves in the middle. They fight until what they’re saying stops being words and then they stomp their ways to bed, where they fall asleep angry. Who left? And where would they go at this time of the night? The silence is stark and she can’t close her eyes, gray spots swirling in her vision like a light show. She just doesn’t understand.

\--------------------

It’s funny how one acclimates to things that would normally annoy them. 4H glances back at her alarm and sees that it’s 2 am, the red lights glaring at her through the darkness as she glares back. The entire apartment complex seems unusually silent without the shouting that she is so used to. She turns over in bed again, but the rustle of her bed sheets feels almost deafening to her. She can hear the old walls creak around her and she can hear pipes rattle a few doors down. The unorthodox lullaby that she is so used to has vanished and in its place is a night of tossing and turning. Above her, there is silence and has been since the door slammed, so whoever left has not come back. She turns over again and stares up at the ceiling, counting the dots in the rough popcorn texture, trying again to fall asleep.

\--------------------

The next morning, she still finds the silence to be nearly unbearable. She hadn’t known what she was getting into when she first rented her apartment, and it took months to get used to the shouting matches from the couple in 5H. But she always had a story to tell about them, and there was obviously some reason that they had been together for as long as they had been. She wonders if her neighbors feel the same way, or if they’re just pleased to finally have some peace and quiet and are resting peacefully for the first time in years. She isn’t sure about how long Rebecca and Tony have been living there, but it seems like they’ve been there longer than anyone else she’s talked to; everyone always says that the arguing couple in 5H was there when they moved into the building. Maybe they sprung up with the building itself, or maybe they’re just haunting it. The woman from 4H decides to do some snooping. She looks at the names on their mail -- that’s not illegal, right? She didn’t open it -- and finds “Mr. Anthony Childs” and “Mrs. Rebecca Childs” written across them.

She isn’t exactly a wiz at computers, but she does understand Google. She doesn’t figure that either of them has any sort of social media -- who would they be keeping in contact with? The friends that they don’t have? -- but she figures maybe their wedding announcement was in the paper once or something. She figures that they got married long enough ago that that might have happened.

She ends up scrolling through a lot of Facebook and Twitter pages that have nothing to do with the couple from 5H until she gets to the third page of her search, which really proves how badly she wanted to find what she was looking for. It’s a small article with a picture from their wedding. They’re standing near each other, but neither of them is smiling at all. The article talks about how they were parts of the original founding families of the town and their parents were thrilled when they set the couple up. So, this was a political marriage? Or they were trying to please their parents? She figures that they’ve lived in this town, in this building for all this time with someone they can’t even stand. She’s beginning to understand these people and she pities them.

Now that she has the information she isn’t sure what to do with it. It’s not like a couple’s counselor would fix this -- you can’t fix what didn’t work to begin with. Plus, she’s minus one person, and you kind of need two to be a couple. 4H closes her eyes and tries to think of ways to solve this so that she can actually sleep that night. The silence is getting to her and she doesn’t want to be alone with her own thoughts.

The stairs creak as she ascends them; she’s never gone to a floor higher than her own here. She walks down the hall that looks identical to hers -- yellow walls, dim lights, worn carpet -- but smells slightly less wet and stops at the door directly above her own. Her hand is poised to knock, but she pauses.

‘Is this really any of my business?’ she asks herself.

She shakes her head slightly and thinks of all of the sleep that she’s missing.

‘You don’t know these people. You’ve talked to the woman on the bus and you’ve snooped on their mail. You can--’ But she’s already knocked loudly.

There’s a faint rustle inside like someone is folding down the corner of a book. The steps are soft, so she assumes that it’s Rebecca. She hopes that it’s Rebecca. She’s never spoken to Tony before and she doesn’t want their first conversation to be, ‘Hi, I live below you, how’s your marriage? Better or worse than absolutely awful like it was last week?’

The door swings open quickly and she jumps. Rebecca is red in the face and poised to shout, but then she blinks and seems to reevaluate who is at the door. Then she smiles sadly.

“I’m sorry about that. I thought you were... Well, I thought that you were somebody else.” Rebecca says with a shake of her head, as though 4H couldn’t determine who she was talking about before she caught herself.

“Don’t worry about it,” she replies, “I was just coming by to see how you were. I heard what happened the other night...” She trails off, quietly downplaying her nosiness by covering it up with care.

“And every other night, I suppose?” Rebecca chuckles with little humor and then adds, “Why don’t you come in?”

She steps in slowly and looks around. There are no pictures on the walls and the couch’s cushions dip on either end, leaving the middle cushion plush and unused. The chairs at the table are on opposite ends. It looks like two people living entirely separate lives lived here with no interaction, nothing.

“Would you like something to drink?” Even the cups are mismatched.

“No, thank you. I just... Do you want to talk about...? Any of it?”

Rebecca sighs and puts the glasses down.

“I don’t mean to intrude. I can go--”

“No, no,” Rebecca cuts off her apology, “I appreciate you coming by. It’s just been a long time of not saying anything.”

“Thirty-two years.” She says without thinking and then looks at her shoes.

Rebecca chuckles again. “You heard that, did you? I’m sorry. I bet you’ve all heard a lot.” She sits down on one of the flattened cushions, so 4H occupies the center cushion. “Tony and I have a marriage of convenience. Our parents were well respected and pressured us to get married from a young age. We couldn’t stand each other, but it was easier than resisting. Tony could never have loved me. Or any woman. And I always wanted children, but that wasn’t going to happen. So, we went into the marriage resenting the other.”

Everything she says is rushed, as though she’s been thinking about what she’s saying for years. She’s focused on her fingers, picking at her chipping red nail polish. He voice is strong. What she’s saying doesn’t hurt her, she’s just resigned to it; these are the facts and this is how it is.

“We’ve lived our entire marriage here. Such close quarters. It was like we were acting when our parents alive, but it felt like a prison. And after they all passed away, we were too worn down to leave.”

“So, what happened a few nights ago?” She asks gently, thinking of all of the ways that she misjudged the arguing couple from 5H.

“He found the strength to walk out. And I wasn’t about to stand in his way. Maybe he’ll meet someone. Maybe he’ll fall in a harbor and drown. I don’t care. I’m just mad that he walked out before I did. But it’s all over now.”

\-------------------------

And that was that. 4H invited Rebecca for dinner that Tuesday. And she came over the following Tuesday as well, so they made it a weekly thing. She never saw Tony again other than when he collected his things and dropped off divorce papers -- which they both smiled at, probably the first time they’d ever smiled in the presence of the other. She finds it so hard to believe that they never at least grew to be friends after so many years, but she supposed that they blamed each other for their lives not being the way they wanted them to be. 4H drank her coffee, put on her makeup, and caught the bus to work as a dental hygienist. When she got home she went to bed and she learned to sleep in the silence.


End file.
